Pixel Aligned Language Models

Large language models have achieved great success in recent years, so as their variants in vision. Existing vision-language models can describe images in natural languages, answer visual-related questions, or perform complex reasoning about the image. However, it is yet unclear how localization tasks, such as word grounding or referring localization, can be performed using large language models. In this work, we aim to develop a vision-language model that can take locations, for example, a set of points or boxes, as either inputs or outputs. When taking locations as inputs, the model performs location-conditioned captioning, which generates captions for the indicated object or region. When generating locations as outputs, our model regresses pixel coordinates for each output word generated by the language model, and thus performs dense word grounding. Our model is pre-trained on the Localized Narrative dataset, which contains pixel-word-aligned captioning from human attention. We show our model can be applied to various location-aware vision-language tasks, including referring localization, location-conditioned captioning, and dense object captioning, archiving state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO and Visual Genome. Project page: https://jerryxu.net/PixelLLM .

Video Summarization: Towards Entity-Aware Captions

Existing popular video captioning benchmarks and models deal with generic captions devoid of specific person, place or organization named entities. In contrast, news videos present a challenging setting where the caption requires such named entities for meaningful summarization. As such, we propose the task of summarizing news video directly to entity-aware captions. We also release a large-scale dataset, VIEWS (VIdeo NEWS), to support research on this task. Further, we propose a method that augments visual information from videos with context retrieved from external world knowledge to generate entity-aware captions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three video captioning models. We also show that our approach generalizes to existing news image captions dataset. With all the extensive experiments and insights, we believe we establish a solid basis for future research on this challenging task.

UnLoc: A Unified Framework for Video Localization Tasks

While large-scale image-text pretrained models such as CLIP have been used for multiple video-level tasks on trimmed videos, their use for temporal localization in untrimmed videos is still a relatively unexplored task. We design a new approach for this called UnLoc, which uses pretrained image and text towers, and feeds tokens to a video-text fusion model. The output of the fusion module are then used to construct a feature pyramid in which each level connects to a head to predict a per-frame relevancy score and start/end time displacements. Unlike previous works, our architecture enables Moment Retrieval, Temporal Localization, and Action Segmentation with a single stage model, without the need for action proposals, motion based pretrained features or representation masking. Unlike specialized models, we achieve state of the art results on all three different localization tasks with a unified approach. Code will be available at: \url{https://github.com/google-research/scenic}.

Does Visual Pretraining Help End-to-End Reasoning?

We aim to investigate whether end-to-end learning of visual reasoning can be achieved with general-purpose neural networks, with the help of visual pretraining. A positive result would refute the common belief that explicit visual abstraction (e.g. object detection) is essential for compositional generalization on visual reasoning, and confirm the feasibility of a neural network "generalist" to solve visual recognition and reasoning tasks. We propose a simple and general self-supervised framework which "compresses" each video frame into a small set of tokens with a transformer network, and reconstructs the remaining frames based on the compressed temporal context. To minimize the reconstruction loss, the network must learn a compact representation for each image, as well as capture temporal dynamics and object permanence from temporal context. We perform evaluation on two visual reasoning benchmarks, CATER and ACRE. We observe that pretraining is essential to achieve compositional generalization for end-to-end visual reasoning. Our proposed framework outperforms traditional supervised pretraining, including image classification and explicit object detection, by large margins.

Dense Video Object Captioning from Disjoint Supervision

We propose a new task and model for dense video object captioning -- detecting, tracking, and captioning trajectories of all objects in a video. This task unifies spatial and temporal understanding of the video, and requires fine-grained language description. Our model for dense video object captioning is trained end-to-end and consists of different modules for spatial localization, tracking, and captioning. As such, we can train our model with a mixture of disjoint tasks, and leverage diverse, large-scale datasets which supervise different parts of our model. This results in noteworthy zero-shot performance. Moreover, by finetuning a model from this initialization, we can further improve our performance, surpassing strong image-based baselines by a significant margin. Although we are not aware of other work performing this task, we are able to repurpose existing video grounding datasets for our task, namely VidSTG and VLN. We show our task is more general than grounding, and models trained on our task can directly be applied to grounding by finding the bounding box with the maximum likelihood of generating the query sentence. Our model outperforms dedicated, state-of-the-art models for spatial grounding on both VidSTG and VLN.

How can objects help action recognition?

Current state-of-the-art video models process a video clip as a long sequence of spatio-temporal tokens. However, they do not explicitly model objects, their interactions across the video, and instead process all the tokens in the video. In this paper, we investigate how we can use knowledge of objects to design better video models, namely to process fewer tokens and to improve recognition accuracy. This is in contrast to prior works which either drop tokens at the cost of accuracy, or increase accuracy whilst also increasing the computation required. First, we propose an object-guided token sampling strategy that enables us to retain a small fraction of the input tokens with minimal impact on accuracy. And second, we propose an object-aware attention module that enriches our feature representation with object information and improves overall accuracy. Our resulting framework achieves better performance when using fewer tokens than strong baselines. In particular, we match our baseline with 30%, 40%, and 60% of the input tokens on SomethingElse, Something-something v2, and Epic-Kitchens, respectively. When we use our model to process the same number of tokens as our baseline, we improve by 0.6 to 4.2 points on these datasets.

Optimizing ViViT Training: Time and Memory Reduction for Action Recognition

In this paper, we address the challenges posed by the substantial training time and memory consumption associated with video transformers, focusing on the ViViT (Video Vision Transformer) model, in particular the Factorised Encoder version, as our baseline for action recognition tasks. The factorised encoder variant follows the late-fusion approach that is adopted by many state of the art approaches. Despite standing out for its favorable speed/accuracy tradeoffs among the different variants of ViViT, its considerable training time and memory requirements still pose a significant barrier to entry. Our method is designed to lower this barrier and is based on the idea of freezing the spatial transformer during training. This leads to a low accuracy model if naively done. But we show that by (1) appropriately initializing the temporal transformer (a module responsible for processing temporal information) (2) introducing a compact adapter model connecting frozen spatial representations ((a module that selectively focuses on regions of the input image) to the temporal transformer, we can enjoy the benefits of freezing the spatial transformer without sacrificing accuracy. Through extensive experimentation over 6 benchmarks, we demonstrate that our proposed training strategy significantly reduces training costs (by $\sim 50\%$) and memory consumption while maintaining or slightly improving performance by up to 1.79\% compared to the baseline model. Our approach additionally unlocks the capability to utilize larger image transformer models as our spatial transformer and access more frames with the same memory consumption.

PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model

We present the training recipe and results of scaling up PaLI-X, a multilingual vision and language model, both in terms of size of the components and the breadth of its training task mixture. Our model achieves new levels of performance on a wide-range of varied and complex tasks, including multiple image-based captioning and question-answering tasks, image-based document understanding and few-shot (in-context) learning, as well as object detection, video question answering, and video captioning. PaLI-X advances the state-of-the-art on most vision-and-language benchmarks considered (25+ of them). Finally, we observe emerging capabilities, such as complex counting and multilingual object detection, tasks that are not explicitly in the training mix.

End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Action Localisation with Video Transformers

The most performant spatio-temporal action localisation models use external person proposals and complex external memory banks. We propose a fully end-to-end, purely-transformer based model that directly ingests an input video, and outputs tubelets -- a sequence of bounding boxes and the action classes at each frame. Our flexible model can be trained with either sparse bounding-box supervision on individual frames, or full tubelet annotations. And in both cases, it predicts coherent tubelets as the output. Moreover, our end-to-end model requires no additional pre-processing in the form of proposals, or post-processing in terms of non-maximal suppression. We perform extensive ablation experiments, and significantly advance the state-of-the-art results on four different spatio-temporal action localisation benchmarks with both sparse keyframes and full tubelet annotations.

VicTR: Video-conditioned Text Representations for Activity Recognition

Vision-Language models have shown strong performance in the image-domain -- even in zero-shot settings, thanks to the availability of large amount of pretraining data (i.e., paired image-text examples). However for videos, such paired data is not as abundant. Thus, video-text models are usually designed by adapting pretrained image-text models to video-domain, instead of training from scratch. All such recipes rely on augmenting visual embeddings with temporal information (i.e., image -> video), often keeping text embeddings unchanged or even being discarded. In this paper, we argue that such adapted video-text models can benefit more by augmenting text rather than visual information. We propose VicTR, which jointly-optimizes text and video tokens, generating 'Video-conditioned Text' embeddings. Our method can further make use of freely-available semantic information, in the form of visually-grounded auxiliary text (e.g., object or scene information). We conduct experiments on multiple benchmarks including supervised (Kinetics-400, Charades), zero-shot and few-shot (HMDB-51, UCF-101) settings, showing competitive performance on activity recognition based on video-text models.